Google Penguin: Friend or Foe?

Just minutes ago I was checking my email and my eyes ran across an AdWords banner about Google Penguin. By now you know about Google’s Penguin algorithm update.

If you’re unfamiliar with Google Penguin, here’s the skinny: it penalizes sites for over-optimization of their SEO launching on April 25, 2012. But if you think the Penguin pill is too big to swallow to recover your rankings, hold on. You see there’s a new breed of SEO “gurus” out there hoping to take advantage of your penalty.

The site linked to the banner ad was offering a Google Penguin audit for $795. Afterwards, guess what? You pay even more to have your site fixed. That’s what you call a whopper of a price.

Life After Google Penguin

Believe it or not, life does go on beyond Google Penguin. But spending money to find out your problem is only about 10% of your problem. How you fix it is 50%. Most importantly, who fixes it covers the other 40%.

The work my firm does for our client partners includes Google Penguin analysis and resolution. This post isn’t an upsell for you to buy from me. Instead, it’s a friendly warning to avoid getting caught up in the sales hype surrounding Penguin. Don’t you remember the post 9/11 anthrax scares? Every news report told you to go out and buy plastic and duct tape. Then secure your home for the next biological threat. Granted, this was an effort to protect your safety. However, duct tape and plastic manufacturers did pretty well as a result.

Penguin audits are no different. Only, they typically are designed to grab some of your money at first. Then once they “reveal” your problem, the fix is in. Soon they have a solution to fix it all for another big, fat fee.

The Real Question to Ask About Google Penguin

If you contact me about doing a Penguin audit, I don’t take your payment information as my first priority. This is huge. You may not even have a Penguin compliancy issue.

Instead, I ask what you are going to do with the information about your non-compliance?

This is more important. How you recover must involve what you can do to make changes to your site content.

What About Spam Backlinks & Google Penguin?

I’m being contacted more often these days by site owners these days requesting backlink deletion services. The method I use to create high-quality backlinks for my client partners involves evaluating every stinking link. Thereafter, we submit a Google disavowal request.

Burn this next sentence into your brain. Google Penguin will devastate your organic rankings forever unless you do something about all those nasty spam backlinks pointing to your site.

So What Do You Do About Google Penguin?

I know what you’re thinking. For years you and millions of site owners hired off-shore SEO firms to create thousands of backlinks. What was once the little secret to get you ranked is now exactly what’s killing your site ranks. So what do you do? Relax, it’s fixable.